Browsers News & Articles

With a new update for Microsoft's Kinect for Windows and devices like the phenomenal-looking Leap from LeapMotion due soon, do we really need touchscreen PCs? Will future systems skip ahead of phones and tablets with embedded sensors to provide more intuitive interaction and bring back a sense of magic to computing?

Microsoft's Internet Explorer market share is back on the rise thanks to its use in Windows Phone 7 smartphones. But it won't have everything its own way as Mozilla plans to bring Firefox to Windows 8 tablets.

Our favorite cross-platform browser just got leaner and meaner, and grew a few new toys. Opera (news, site) has just released version 11.50, which comes with a few enhancements that might have been inspired by some of Opera's competitors. But when you're at the #5 position in terms of market share, you can take a few liberties with your design and still call it a stroke of genius.

Still in beta, the new and cool social-themed browser, RockMelt (news, site) adds improved Gmail support, a speedy Chromium core and faster social interactions. Let's have a look.

With Microsoft (news, site) rebounding like Dennis Rodman in his prime, can the company pull another Windows 7 or Windows 7 Phone out of its hat with IE9?

Twelve months, €900,000 in research and a whole lot of feedback from its partners through its recently launched extranet and Irish-based TERMINALFOUR (news, site)  has a completely new edition of its enterprise grade web content management system.

It's a mobile epidemic! And trust us, "epidemic" is in no way too strong a word. Opera's mobile browser, Opera Mini, proves it with recent numbers: for the first time ever, users viewed more than 10 billion pages in one month according to the State of the Mobile Web report by Opera.

Opera (news, site) got on the mobile hype way back in 1998 when they developed their first mobile browser. Since then (especially in recent times), they've done a pretty good job at staying in the spotlight. The mobile browser has seen a growth in user base of over 4.2% globally since May 2009, and over 143% over the past year. Their page views have increased by over 8 percent over the figures for the month of May and for the first time, breached the 10 billion mark in June.

Opera's numbers reflect a quickly growing trend: “More than 10 billion page views in one month underscore that the Web is already the platform of choice for mobile devices," explained Jon von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera. "Web standards provide a more efficient way to create flawless sites across all devices."

If you're ready to join the movement, it looks like Opera's a good place to start. The self-proclaimed "most popular mobile Web browser" is currently available as version 4.2 and features personalized skins, better video support and synced notes. Check it out here.

We’ve exhausted our clever browser wars word play, so we’ll just come right out and say it: Firefox 3.5 was released for download today. 

The anticipated release comes one year after the launch of Firefox 3, and is being described by its creators as “the best performing browser Mozilla has ever released.” While that may be true—and has certainly got us geeks excited—those seeking one single rock-your-socks feature will be sorely disappointed. It appears that Firefox 3 isn’t about pulling ahead with fancy new functionality, rather, it’s about catching up.

It seems like it was only yesterday when Google graced us with Chrome and the browser world subsequently went bananas, doesn’t it? That’s probably because it was only 8 months ago. Now, back for round 2 is our dear old uncle Google with a newer, faster release that includes over 300 bug fixes and a 30% faster browsing experience thanks to a new WebKit and Javascript update.

Now an official part of the stable channel, users can also expect the following, more apparent features from Chrome:

Improved New Tab Page: Though it was arguably one of the coolest features of Chrome’s initial release, a lot of users found the the thumbnails on the home page too revealing. Now you can browse without fear of the person nearest you finding out that you frequent Perez Hilton’s gossip blog by clicking the new Remove Thumbnails link.

Full Screen Mode: We missed you, F11 key. Now use every single pixel on your screen by either hitting F11 or selecting the Full Screen Mode option in the Tools menu.

Form Autofill: Don't stress about having to enter your information into the same form fields over and over again. Chrome now remembers it. And, if at any time you wish to clear out your info, you can do so in the Tools menu.

If you’re already using the browser, you’ll be automatically updated to the new version shortly. If you’ve just been convinced to try it, we don't blame you. You can get started here. Need more convincing? Check out a video of all the new features here. 

It's getting closer. SharePoint 2010 that is. And now that the dates are all out in the open, Microsoft is offering us information to get our infrastructure ready.

A new post has just come out on the Microsoft SharePoint Team blog outlining the Preliminary System Requirements for SharePoint 2010. Here's a quick look:

• It's all 64-bit: SharePoint itself, Windows 2008, SQL Server 2005 or SQL Server 2008
• Browser Compatibility: Brace yourself -- IE6 is out. Supported browsers on Windows systems will include IE7/IE8, Firefox 3.x. Microsoft will also increase compatibility for Firefox 3.x and Safari 3.x on non-Windows OS.

The team offers 6 things you can do to get ready including getting your environment to 64-bit and running the Update Checker that comes with Service Pack 2.

You'll also find a beginning set of common Q&A's in this post that will grow as required.

One key question is about supporting IE6 for publishing sites. A good question considering we can't control what browsers our public websites are being viewed with. The answer, a little comforting, and perhaps a peak into some of the changes for the web content management capabilities in the next version, "...2010 will provide a deep level of control over the markup and styling of the reader experience".

Time to start getting ready. You may want to consider the SharePoint Conference in October to help you out as well.

Internet Explorer 8 has been officially released. Now it's time to download it and start seeing what it really does to your website or web application. For some, things may go smoothly, for others, not so much. Trouble is, IE8 may be new, but is it already obsolete?

Following a wave of browser related awesomeness, comprised of multi-process architecture (Chrome) and bar-raising sexiness (Safari), a brave and very unlikely candidate has dropped a few breadcrumbs concerning a new solution in the works.

Microsoft’s prototype—codenamed Gazelle—is reportedly after a huge fish. Taking a different route to their desired success than the aforementioned, the company’s research team recently released a thesis on what a secure browser should really look like. The statement addresses a number of security issues that have been around since day one, and the proposed solutions make Gazelle out to be the first browser that thinks like an operating system.

The catch? It’s slower, it uses more resources than IE7 and as of today, it’s still unavailable for test runs. If it’s ever finally released to the public, what do you think the chances are that the world will trade in convenience and speed for security?

Friday is a good day to have a laugh at Microsoft's expense - don't you think. Thought so.

So they finally decided to get with the compatibility program with Internet Explorer 8. But they may have drug their heels just a little too long and now they are paying the price.

According to ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley, Microsoft has released an Internet Explorer (IE) 8 incompatibility list. This is a list of websites that do not render probably when IE is run in standards mode. The list has a whopping 2400 websites on it and it is getting updated on a regular basis.

Perhaps what is so amazingly funny (or not so funny, depending on who you talk to) is that the incompatible websites are not your average joe, no one really looks at them anyway, websites. Here's a few examples of the websites that are not compatible:

• microsoft.com
• google.com
• yahoo.com
• wikipedia.org
• flickr.com
• wordpress.com
• adobe.com
• facebook.com
• apple.com
• youtube.com

This is a downloaded a list and there's a version for XP users and a version for Vista users.

The list is used by your IE8 browser to allow you to opt-out of viewing any website on that list in standards mode. There's also a button that allows you to add websites to the list.

Now we understand that IE8 is only out as a Release Candidate, but come on, even their own site doesn't run properly in standards mode?

What exactly did Microsoft do for standards in IE8? Enhancements to the standards include:

• Standards support (CSS/HTML): Data: URIs, the abbr tag, CSS generated content; Display: table CSS properties, fixes for a number of CSS and HTML parsing bugs
• Standards support (DOM) and AJAX : IE8 contains an enhanced and standardized DOM as well as support for AJAX with features like DOM: Storage, Cross Document Messaging (XDM) and the Selectors APIs
• Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) Specification: IE8 will also support the new ARIA specification from the WCAG. Things like support for ARIA Markup and DHTML Extensions for Accessibility are included.

Want to understand Microsoft's compatibility view better? Read it here.

So while Mozilla fights with its mobile browser and Google brings on Pre-Beta 2 of Chrome, the browser wars rang on. Problem is, no one seems to be fighting on the same battlefield.

Attention! The mobile world’s cluster of hopeful operating systems just got slightly bigger thanks to Azingo, who recently announced the Azingo Mobile Platform 2.0. Based on Linux and other open source innovations, the platform enters our ring of competitors bravely with dukes up, sporting a powerful browser and Web Runtime for easy Web application play.

Google Chrome is a good browser. A speedy, delightful little browser. Sure, the themes and fancy applications that Mozilla offers aren’t there, but the crash rate is much lower, the dynamic tabs are sweet and you’re warned when you may be visiting a harmful website. In fact, perhaps it’s the no-frills approach that has kept Chrome as functional as it is.

Whatever the case, no-frills is still no-frills, and in an era of endless options there will always be those that try to add a little “flava” to the things that lack it. As a result, add-ons to Chrome are available via browser bookmarklets. Because of popular demand, you can now even employ them in order to manage two new ways to work with RSS feeds.